


Open Mic

by SaffronSnitch



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, homoerotic annoyance, homoerotic cheez-its, homoerotic slam poetry, homoerotic weed smoking, homoerotic welsh history, noah the stoner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:28:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29837430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaffronSnitch/pseuds/SaffronSnitch
Summary: Gansey and co attend an open mic poetry reading.
Relationships: Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 3
Kudos: 42





	Open Mic

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a silly story about slam poetry but it turned into 4000 words of the gangsey smoking weed.

“You want us to do  _ what?” _

Gansey looked up from his milkshake innocently, eyes darting between Ronan and Adam, the former looking murderous, the latter wearing an expression of incredulity. Gansey swallowed a mouthful of peanut butter milkshake. “Slam poetry,” he said, then added hurriedly before Ronan could make another jibe, “Not  _ perform, _ obviously, just go watch the open mic night.”

“Not  _ perform, _ obviously,” Ronan repeated under his breath. Adam kicked him under the table. The three of them were slurping down milkshakes and fries at a downtrodden diner right off the highway which was frequented by blazed out teenagers and hungover truckers (at the moment, Gansey and co were firmly in the first category, no thanks to Noah, who’d stayed at Monmouth Manufacturing due to the ley lines but not before getting the rest of them thoroughly high out of their minds). 

“Look,” Adam began, trailing a french fry limply through some ketchup. “I’m sure open mic slam poetry is like… illuminating, and life-changing, or whatever, but I’m not going to skip work just to watch some college drop-outs wax poetic about their own cocks.”

Ronan snorted.

Gansey, on the other hand, looked hopeful. “Oh! No worries about work, the open mic is at 3:30, right after we get out of school.”

Ronan snorted again, this time nearly spraying milkshake (mint chip) out of his nose. “So this is an open mic  _ afternoon _ . Even better.”

Adam pondered the situation. Gansey, while certainly the most likely out of the three of them to be interested in some sort of performative art expression of emotion, Adam would have never pegged him for the open mic type. This was the guy who Adam had found having a panic attack in the bathroom after an adult improv theater troupe gave an assembly at Aglionby and called him onstage to participate. 

“I just thought it would be fun,” said Gansey, now looking a bit defeated, “to try something new for a change.”

“We try new things all the time,” Ronan grumbled, passing a hand over his forehead. His dreams had tired him out. Adam could see the dark circles under his eyes. 

“He’s right,” Adam pointed out. “We  _ literally _ are doing something new right now.”

He was speaking, of course, of the now-faint buzz incurred by copious amounts of weed. Noah had finally whittled down Gansey’s self-respect through a combination of appealing to his sense of adventure and pointing out his high anxiety levels, and the four of them had smoked two whole joints together that afternoon.

The smoking itself had been almost nerve-wracking for Adam, who hated letting control slip away from him. Out of the four of them, Noah was the only one who had smoked before, which surprised exactly no one. Gansey was too high-strung, as was Adam — and Ronan, of course, preferred drinking to almost any other form of teenage shenanigans. (Except jacking off, which Adam preferred not to think about). 

Noah had rolled the joints himself, looking happier than he had for some time.

“This is fun, guys!” he said, licking the paper to stick to the filter and handing the first joint to Gansey, who stared at it.

“Jesus, Gansey,” Ronan said, “it’s not going to send you to Hell. I think I’d know.”

“Devil’s lettuce,” Adam had said.

“What do I do with it?” Gansey asked, and Adam’s chest filled with such affection that it almost spilled over into saying something affectionate and stupid, but he tamped it down just in time. “Do I — oh, yes, thanks Noah. I just light the end here? And — okay, inhale?”

“Hold it in your lungs for a moment,” Noah said, demonstrating with a second joint. He exhaled smoke in a perfect stream. 

Adam had to admit, it was — erotic, in a way, the four of them stretched out in Monmouth: Gansey horizontal on the couch, Noah perched on the arm of the sofa, Adam and Ronan sprawled on the floor. They passed the joints around the four of them, and each time Adam took a pull he felt his lips tingle having touched the place that the others’ mouths had too. 

“I don’t feel anything,” said Gansey, staring at the ceiling. “When does it kick in?”

Ronan, who was braiding the edge of the rug into tiny plaits, gave an awfully horse-like snort and then keeled over fully. Adam thought he looked younger like this, laughing without any real weight to it. Gansey peered over the edge of the couch, then made exasperated eye contact with Adam.

“I’m feeling it,” Adam admitted. He felt at peace. His friends were here, warm and fuzzy, and the afternoon sunlight filtered through the windows like ribbons. 

An hour later, zonked out of their minds, Noah popped out of existence. Not even the influence of marijuana could make them bug out about a commonality like this, and so they merely sighed.

“Shame,” said Gansey, who was delicately stroking the length of his own nose. “I was going to ask him to make popcorn. He’s the only one who manages to never burn it.”

Ronan sat straight up with a feral intensity. “Food!”

Adam groaned. The high had just barely started to fade, and the sound of them talking was infiltrating his good ear with an unwelcome harshness. “I don’t wanna watch you both make anything,” he said.   
“We can order in.”

“We can go to Nino’s.”

“We can go to that diner off the highway.”

There it was.

Despite his best efforts, Gansey ended up going to the first open mic afternoon alone. Adam bailed last minute, citing a very real but also very convenient extra shift at Boyd’s, and Ronan said, every so eloquently, “You didn’t actually think I’d go to a fucking poetry reading, did you?”

So Gansey went alone — not to recite his own poetry, he reassured Noah, who seemed vaguely interested. He returned to Monmouth in the early evening. Ronan and Noah were neck and neck in Mario Kart, but Gansey settled into the couch space between them and sighed.

Ronan was fairly attuned to Gansey’s sighs. This one was not the Gansey sigh of exasperation, which was usually accompanied by a roll of the eyes or a pointed glare. Nor was it a sigh of defeat or exhaustion, during which Gansey would rub his eyes wearily. This was, most certainly, a sigh which was meant to garner attention for himself. 

So, naturally, Ronan ignored him. Attention seeking punk.

“Don’t you want to hear how it was?” Gansey said, after sighing for a second time left the room unchangeably silent. 

“Not really,” said Ronan, at the same time as Noah said, “Sure.” Ronan took advantage of the subsequent pause in conversation to lap Noah’s car.

“Fuck!”

“Ha!” 

“It was… amazing,” said Gansey, head in the clouds. He leaned back against the couch cushions and gazed blankly at the TV. “People are so eloquent and meaningful with their words, it was far more poetic than I was really expecting. And there were a fair number of people there! Mostly older adults, of course, but there were a handful of folks our age!”

Ronan let him keep talking, because as much as he loathed to betray this fact, Gansey’s inevitable passion about things as mundane and stupid as poetry was actually one of his more endearing features. But once Gansey started waxing poetic (pun intended) about the ways in which medieval speech patterns continue to manifest in modern-day linguistic modelling, Ronan changed the subject.

“Where’s Parrish anyway? I thought he was going to come over for dinner.”

This stopped Gansey’s tirade against mid-twentieth century normcore. “Adam was coming over? I thought he had work.”

Ronan coughed. “Maybe I was wrong.” More likely was that it was wishful thinking.

Gansey talked them into going to the next open mic through a combination of incessant haranguing and some genuinely compelling points. Still, while Gansey might enjoy poetry stone cold sober, the rest of them were not of that moral caliber, and so the following Wednesday found Noah, Adam, and Ronan standing outside the Pig, which was parked around the corner from their final locale, with Gansey as a lookout. 

“I still think this is a bit disrespectful.”

“Shut up, Gansey,” said Ronan as he gestured for his turn with the joint, which Adam was currently using to practice blowing smoke rings. “Enough showing off, Parrish.”

“Fine,” said Adam through a pursed exhale, and he ignored the way Ronan’s gaze followed his mouth. 

After a few more minutes, Noah stubbed the joint out with his shoe and the three of them followed Gansey down the sidewalk. It was a brisk autumnal evening, October in Henrietta, and although Adam wore a sweater, he shivered slightly. Ronan’s head whipped around, and Adam wished Ronan would give him his jacket. Adam wished Ronan would stop looking at him like that. Adam looked at Ronan  _ like that. _

“Wait,” Noah said, from behind them. “It’s a house?”   
It was a house — 300 Fox Way, according to the placard on the mailbox — and there were a good number of people streaming in, most dressed eclectically in shawls and purples and metallics.

“Artists,” Ronan said, his jaw tight in either disgust or awe.

“I’m going to go… talk to some people,” Gansey said vaguely, distracted by something sudden, and he veered off into a nearby corner.

Almost simultaneously, a bright and beautiful thing popped up by Noah’s shoulder, startling him into dropping a cheese cracker which had, miraculously and suspiciously, perhaps been in his hand this whole time. One never could tell with Noah.

“Hello,” said the thing, and when Adam blinked it morphed into a girl. Woman really, all curves and long lines — next to him, Ronan made a noise that resembled a tremulous sort of laugh.

Noah nodded at her. “Hullo.”

“You’re very attractive,” she said, looking forward, and it took them all a moment to situate themselves and realize that she meant — 

“ _ Ronan?” _ Adam squawked out, not bothering to hold in his cackle. Ronan glared at him furiously, but the girl was undeterred.

“Ronan,” she agreed, blinking flirtatiously with a certain  _ je ne sais quoi _ . Adam wasn’t sure how she did it, really, but one minute she was standing along the line of the triangle the three boys had been arranged in, and the next she was wedged between Adam and Ronan, her cheek brushing Ronan’s shoulder. 

Adam made meaningful eye contact with Noah, who shrugged, as if to say:  _ She’ll probably die, but I don’t know what we could do to avoid it. _

Ronan spoke for the first time with a simplistic but classic Ronanism. “Fuck off.”   
“Oh, my!” the girl trilled. “You  _ are _ sexy.”

“ORLA!” came a voice from beyond them, and the girl frowned.

“Duty calls,” she said, and drifted off, but not before one more significant look at Ronan (up and down, totally checking him out). 

Noah, who had managed to materialize some potato chips seemingly out of thin air (but, upon further inspection, had probably reached only a foot away to reach a nearby snack table), opened his mouth to say something funny, but Ronan’s face warned him off.

“I’m going to find Gansey and get us seats,” he said, and scurried off. 

Adam turned his entire focus back to Ronan and found that he was already looking at him with a blank expression on his face.

“What?”   
“You thought she was pretty.” Ronan didn’t frame it like a question. 

“Yeah?” Adam hated the scrutiny instantly because it reminded him of how Ronan was gay, and he couldn’t be the only one who knew it, but no one ever talked about it, mostly because Ronan never told them about it, and he had been thrust into this limbo of knowing and not knowing like he was in a stupid episode of F·R·I·E·N·D·S.

On the other hand, maybe he was starting to get hungry. Weed gave you the munchies, right?

“Here,” said Ronan, somehow reading Adam’s mind and passing him a napkin with what looked like a pistachio muffin on it. Ronan’s hand lingered on Adam’s a second too long, and for a moment Adam didn’t mind it and he basked in the attention of being wanted. Then he coughed and pulled the muffin to his mouth. He didn’t bother thanking Ronan, whose face shuttered once more. 

The lights dimmed in some semblance of calling the room to order, and they made their way to where Gansey and Noah had secured them seats, on the left corner next to a picture of someone who looked suspiciously like Steve Martin. Adam squinted and peered closer. It  _ was _ Steve Martin. And it was signed, too. What kind of place was this?

Up at the front of the room, which housed a single stool in some faux stage set-up, a tiny girl was dragging a microphone stand. She adjusted the height of the mic, then squinted out at all of them in the audience. Her denim overalls glinted with what looked like tiny sewn on metallic sequins. “Hi,” she said. “Welcome to Fox Way, my humble abode. I’m Blue, and I’m excited to be emceeing tonight’s open mic. I have a list of sign-ups from some of y’all, brave poets and performers, but as always, we’ll have time at the end for more  _ spontaneous _ offerings. Now, let’s make some noise for our first reader! Gansey — oh, sorry, there’s no last name here, it just says Gansey — oh, Gansey is his last name? Okay, Gansey, the stage is yours!”

Slowly, minutely, like a predatory owl seeking out a mouse, Ronan, Adam, and Noah all swiveled their heads to look at Gansey, who was looking very much the part of the mouse.

“Oh,” he said, hands flapping meaninglessly at chest height, “I didn’t think I would be first. I signed up for the sixth slot.”

This was a shocking development. Gansey stood on the makeshift stage, awkwardly fumbling with the microphone while the emcee, Blue, waited with a perfectly arched eyebrow. It was all completely shocking.

Once, Adam had helped Gansey prepare for an English presentation. It had been on  _ The Great Gatsby, _ which Adam had read and liked, and he thought Gansey had a great grasp of the themes and motifs throughout the novel. He watched as Gansey flipped through his slides that he had made for the presentation, all bullet pointed and organized cleanly, and at the end Adam had very little feedback to give.

“It looks great,” he had told Gansey. “You seem prepared.”

But Gansey had not looked convinced. Haltingly, quietly, Gansey explained how he always felt out of step at the end of a presentation. The question section. See, Gansey had been trained from a very young age to be a good public speaker — in the confident, conventional, masculine sort of way — and he could shmooze his way through a political fundraiser no problem. But Gansey hated being purposefully put into a position where people aimed to poke holes in his carefully constructed persona; to be put on the spot; to be asked something he didn’t know.    
Adam had not expected Gansey to intentionally put himself in the position of being criticized, which is what he thought a poetry open mic to be. Beside him, Ronan was murmuring a gleeful string of jibes under his breath — on his other side, Noah’s head lolled into Adam’s shoulder. Adam was still painfully high. 

Gansey figured out his microphone cord problem and straightened up from where he was half-squatting. “Right,” he said, pulling — get this — a piece of lined paper from his pocket, folded over once. “Okay, so” — the microphone squeaked once, and Gansey ducked out of the way until the feedback subsided — “this is a poem I wrote about history.”

“Oh my god,” Adam whispered. “He wrote a poem about fucking  _ Glendower. _ ”

And so he had — Gansey walked his way through a cleanly written (but fairly embarrassing) poem about his Welsh king. He talked about the legend and the historical context and the drive to know more. He didn’t talk about the ley lines, although he talked about power as a metaphor, and he didn’t talk about his own personal devotion to Glendower. All in all, it came off as a mix of a history project and a journal entry, scribbled in his notebook late at night.

Ronan, as expected, looked revolted. “I’m never going to let him live this down,” he said in a low voice, his mouth warm next to Adam’s good ear. 

“I think it’s sweet,” said Adam, after Gansey had ended his poem, nodding his head once and folding the paper back up in his pocket. Then, a second later — “oh.”

Because it had become suddenly obvious why Gansey had done the whole thing. Blue, the emcee in her denim ensemble, stepped close to him to exchange words, and Gansey’s whole face changed into a brighter version. His eyebrows perked up and his cheeks did their scrunchy thing that Adam had, upon their first smoking session, admitted was “adorable.”

The moment passed — Gansey made his way off the stage as a butch woman with tattoos rivaling Ronan’s replaced him. When Gansey got back to their row, scooching past other seated people towards his chair, Adam could tell that he was massively blushing. HA.

“Nice one,” whispered Noah. Ronan made a noise. Gansey looked at Adam questioningly.

“Interesting poem,” Adam said, and Gansey’s face remained unsure, “but I think the emcee really liked it.”

Together, the four of them peered up to the girl in the shadow of the stage, who was enraptured by the butch woman currently giving an incredibly heartfelt slam poem rendition of her coming out story. 

“You think so?” Gansey whispered.

“Yeah.”

After four more poetry performances, each one weirder than the last, Adam turned vaguely to Ronan and said, “My respect for Gansey is starting to skyrocket.”

Ronan’s eyes didn’t leave the front of the room, but he said, “Yeah?”   
“Yeah,” Adam repeated. “Going up there, performing something heartfelt, knowing that everyone in the room is judging you massively… I could never do that.”

It wasn’t meant as a dare, but Adam could tell Ronan took it like one from the way the muscle in his jaw jumped, like gears whirring in his head. 

“So—” Ronan started.

“No,” Adam said, “I’m not going to do that.”

“I dare you to go up there—”   
“No way.”

“Fine,” said Ronan, but there was a glint in his gaze that meant business. “Then dare me.”

Adam swallowed. “What?”

“Dare me to go up there and recite poetry.”

“I— uh, okay. I dare you.”

Right on cue, Blue the emcee tapped the mic and asked, “Any volunteers for our next poem?” Ronan didn’t break eye contact with Adam as he raised a hand in the air. 

Blue gestured at him to come onstage, and Ronan stood with a confidence that even Henry Cheng couldn’t have mustered in this situation. God, but he was cocky, all gritted teeth and rolled eyes, but with a nonchalance that Adam had never — not even in his most practiced moments — been able to master. 

“Oh Christ, what’s he doing?” Gansey muttered, as Adam turned his good ear towards the left. 

Adam huffed, just slightly. “I don’t think you can judge,” he said, wryly, even as Ronan walked to the front of the room. “Given your whole performance.”

“Well, I-” Gansey spluttered. Adam, patient, gave him a moment to collect his thoughts. “I  _ prepared,” _ Gansey said, as if there was anything worse in the world besides slam poetry off the cuff. Which, maybe he had a point with.

And Adam was still high, though the buzz was fading fast with the exposure to stale audience air and bad metaphors. Ronan didn’t fumble with the microphone like Gansey did; instead, he stepped right up to it and squinted into the audience. Adam felt a wave of  _ something _ wash over him. Some feeling that he couldn’t describe, or didn’t want to understand. 

“Hi,” said Ronan into the microphone, and it was all so ridiculous and tense and silly and Adam was so,  _ so _ high that he laughed out loud, in one burst, earning the wrathful glare of Blue the emcee and a solidarity snort from Noah, who had procured hummus dip and was sucking it off of a baby carrot. 

“Be nice,” muttered Gansey. Then Ronan began.

Obviously Ronan hadn’t prepared anything. The very idea was preposterous. And Adam would’ve bet money — a rare thing, given his financial circumstances — that Ronan had never written (or read, even for school) poetry in his life.

And yet.

Ronan somehow spoke with a candor that even Gansey in all his glitz had lacked. He somehow — and Adam found his mouth dry at this point — wove a yarn of self-hatred, of religion, of friendship and animosity, for which poetry was the only descriptive word that could be used.

Holy shit, Ronan was good.

He was good — and Adam could tell the audience thought he was good, the way they hung onto his every word. Ronan’s performance could use some work, as he spoke drily and monotonously, but he had unshakable confidence, and a way about his language which screamed care. 

Adam had never been so surprised in his life.

Gansey was, too. Adam could tell from how Gansey’s breathing pattern changed, and when he hazarded a sideways glance, he could see Gansey’s eyes fixed intently on Ronan, soaking up the sight.

Adam needed to laugh again. It was bubbling up inside of him. This was so… weird! Ronan reciting poetic truths in front of a crowd of strangers, catching Adam’s gaze in a dare… 

Ronan’s voice trailed off, and Adam abruptly stood up, knocked his chair backwards, and stumbled out of the room, ignoring Gansey’s question and not trusting himself to say a word. He thought he might have heard Ronan say “Parrish,” as he left, but he passed the front hall and exited out the front door into the coolness of an autumnal early evening, and exhaled in one deep breath.

He was… maybe a little bit fucked. 

Of course, the door opened behind him, and Adam hoped for one fervent moment that it was Gansey, please let it be Gansey, he would dread this conversation with Gansey but he could at least handle Gansey looking at him in that inconsiderate awfully mortifying way of being known…

“What the fuck, Parrish?” he said, because it was Ronan, of course, fuck all. “Why’d you leave like that? You dared me to do it.”

Adam felt annoyance build in him like a science experiment, like any moment it would bubble over and force him to do something really stupid, like yell.

Instead Adam kissed him. It was much easier to do than he thought — he really just leaned over and pressed his mouth against Ronan’s. After a moment, when it seemed like Ronan was just going to stand there and not kiss him back, Adam pulled back into himself. But then Ronan leaned in, just a fraction of an inch, and Adam lost his head a bit. He leaned fully into Ronan, one hand finding its way to the back of Ronan’s neck, the other just barely at his hip.

They separated when a clatter sounded down the street. It was a cat, white and slinky. It must have crashed into a trash can. 

Ronan was breathing hard. Adam could hear it out of his good ear. And that… for some reason that made Adam smirk, just vaguely, because he was pretty sure that had been Ronan’s first kiss. 

“Was that really,” said Ronan, “all it took?”   
“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Ronan, but it was with a hint of bravado that meant he was nervous, or angry, or happy, “that I’ve been trying to get you to kiss me for  _ months _ , and it was Gansey’s  _ STUPID  _ poetry slam that did it?”   
“Well,” Adam said, and turned to look at Ronan, who — by smiling — proved it was happiness Adam heard, “it wasn’t  _ Gansey’s  _ poem that did it.”   
“Fuck you,” Ronan said, and kissed him again.

They went back into the house eventually, because Gansey and Noah were there along with some excellent Cheez-Its, and then the poetry open mic concluded with Blue the emcee recited some of her own work, which was jagged and callous and made Gansey practically rock a hard-on right there in his seat. 

“Embarrassing,” whispered Ronan, but his little finger was pressing into Adam’s forearm, so who was embarrassing now?

After Blue concluded her poem with a bout of swearing and then unceremoniously dragged the microphone offstage, Gansey and co stood up and convened in a small circle.

“Interesting night all around,” Gansey said, placing his thumb against his bottom lip.

“Indeed,” said Noah, affecting pretension but failing miserably. 

“I think you should ask for the emcee’s number,” said Adam. Blue was decidedly  _ not _ eyeing Gansey, which meant she desperately wanted to.

Gansey perked up. “Really?”

“Yeah,” said Ronan, surprising them all. “What?” he asked, when they all looked at him in confusion. “I liked her poem. Nice string of swears at the end.”

“Not quite ‘An Ode to Glendower,’” Adam concurred, “but lovely spirit.”


End file.
